Context:

The energy and environmental panorama that our societies confront nowadays, demand for renewable, clean and abundant sources of energy, not reliant on fossil fuels and detached from the geopolitical pressures the latter represent. In this scenario solar thermal energy arises as a viable and functional option. The main disadvantage of this emerging source of energy lies in the intermittent availability of solar radiation. Because of this difficulty, efficient processes for the storage of thermal solar energy becomes a highly relevant area of research. The aim of this paper is to present a survey on this topic.

Method:

A bibliographic review was carried out using the Scopus catalog. The search criteria for this purpose was defined using the following terms: solar+thermal+energy+storage+materials. This search pattern was applied to the title, abstracts and keywords of the contributions. Using the bibliometric tools of the citation database, the most cited documents were selected and the survey was developed.

Results:

A growing interest in the scientific community regarding this energy practice is evident starting from 2010. Characteristics, advances and trends in systems that use thermal energy storage materials are presented for sensible and latent heat, materials compound changeover phase, and finally thermo- chemical thermal storage materials.

Conclusions:

Improving the thermal conductivity of thermal storage materials is an important trend in current research. On the other hand, profitable practices for micro-encapsulated phase change materials and composite materials are analyzed. The optimization of thermo-physical properties as the melting point of thermal storage materials is explored with techniques such as eutectic mixtures and hydro- carbon chain length. Although the thermochemical materials are still in laboratory stage, they have a great potential as thermal storage materials in the future, given their large energy storage capacity per unit volume.

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